David S. Rose is an Inc. 500 CEO, serial entrepreneur, real estate developer and financial technology investor who has founded or funded over 100 pioneering companies. He has been described by Forbes as "New York's Archangel", by BusinessWeek as a "world conquering entrepreneur", by Crain's New York Business as "the father of angel investing in New York”, and by Red Herring magazine as "patriarch of Silicon Alley". He is the New York Times best-selling author of both Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money & Having Fun Investing in Startups, and The Startup Checklist: 25 Steps to a Scalable, High-Growth Business.
As an entrepreneurial executive, David is the Founder and CEO of the US Real Estate Market, an innovative capital markets platform for fractionalized institutional investment in commercial real estate. He is also the Founder and Executive Chairman of Gust, which operates the world's largest online platform and community for entrepreneurs and early-stage investors. Gust is used by over a million entrepreneurs in 193 countries to connect with over 85,000 early-stage investors and is the official collaboration and deal flow management platform for over a thousand business angel networks, accelerators and venture capital funds.
David is the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of New York Angels; Managing Director of Rose Tech Ventures; a Founding General Partner of True Global Ventures; and Co-Founder of the AREA PropTech venture accelerator. He is Associate Founder and Founding Track Chair for Finance, Entrepreneurship and Economics of Singularity University, the post-graduate program in exponential technologies, and chairs the Venture Capital committee of the Real Estate Board of NY.
David was the initial investor and Chairman of the Board of each of JUMP Bikes, acquired by Uber; Comixology, acquired by Amazon; Pond5, acquired by Accel; and Panjiva, acquired by S&P Global. He serves as a board director of cybersecurity developer KoolSpan and Chairman of Pinktada, applying blockchain technology to the hospitality industry. David is an active early-stage investor in companies including RealtyMogul, DSTLRY, and nextGenHQ.
From his initial involvement with the first online communities in the 1970s, through pioneering the field of real estate technology in the 1980s, developing one of the first wireless data information networks in the 1990s and the first global angel investing platform in the 2000s, creating the first Company as a Service platform in the 2010s and a unique real estate capital market platform in the 2020s, David has continually been at the forefront of innovation in business and financial technology.
Among the fields in which he has been actively involved as an executive, board member or investor are: real estate development and investment, proptech, financial technology, capital markets platforms, wireless communications, consumer electronics, crowdsourcing, international finance, social networking, space tourism, user-generated content, online video, mobile network security, biological testing, electronic music, citizen journalism, out-of-home advertising, fiber-optic networking, concierge medicine, online marketing, interactive voice response, and many others.
David is well known in the business startup community for discovering and mentoring high-potential entrepreneurs, and has been profiled by BusinessWeek as "The Pitch Coach" for his ability to help CEOs perfect their fundraising skills. He is a regular speaker at the TED conferences, and his TEDtalk on How to Pitch a VC has been viewed over a million times. David was been named a Top Writer for five years in a row by Quora, the knowledge-based website where his more than eleven thousand answer to questions about entrepreneurship and investing have garnered him over 100,000 followers. His writings have been featured in Inc. magazine, Huffington Post, Slate, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. David is a frequent lecturer at business schools including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Cambridge, Stanford, UVA, CUNY, and Stevens, and he was named Mentor of the Year by NYU's Stern School of Business.
Prior to founding AirMedia Corporation in 1988, for which he served as CEO for over ten years, his career included over fifteen years in real estate development, government, teaching and urban planning. David was co-founder and Chairman of The Computer Classroom and Vice President, Development at Rose Associates, Inc. Earlier, he served as Deputy Director of the New York office of US Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
A native New Yorker, David has a BA in Urban Affairs from Yale University, an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School and a D. Eng. (hc) from Stevens Institute of Technology. He is a graduate of PS 6 in the New York City public school system and of Horace Mann High School. He is an Associate Fellow of Pierson College at Yale University, a member of the Entrepreneurship Advisory Boards of Columbia Business School and Yale University, and an advisor to the Alan B. Levan NSU | Broward Center of Innovation. David can be followed online @davidsrose
